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Towards an understanding of the relationship between disciplinary research cultures and open access repository behaviours

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-09-10, 13:24 authored by Jenny FryJenny Fry, Valerie Spezi, Stephen Probets, Claire Creaser
This paper explores the cultural characteristics of three ‘open access (OA) friendly’ disciplines (physics, economics and clinical medicine) and the ways in which those characteristics influence perceptions, motivations and behaviours towards green OA. The empirical data are taken from two online surveys of European authors. Taking a domain analytic approach, the analysis draws on Becher and Trowler’s (2001) and Whitley’s (2000) theories to gain a deeper understanding of why open access repositories (OAR) play a particularly important role in the chosen disciplines. The surveys provided a unique opportunity to compare perceptions, motivations and behaviours of researchers at the discipline level with the parent metadiscipline. Albeit, participants were not drawn from a stratified sample of all the different sub-disciplines that constitute each discipline and therefore the generalizability of the findings to the discipline is limited. The differential role of informal and formal communication in each of the three disciplines has shaped green OA practices. For physicists and economists, preprints are an essential feature of their respective OAR landscapes, whereas for clinical medics final published articles have a central role. In comparing the disciplines with their parent metadisciplines there were some notable similarities/differences, which have methodological implications for studying research cultures.

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge funding from PEER for the PEER Behavioural Research conducted between 2009-2011, which enabled the collection of the data used in this article.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

JASIST

Citation

FRY, J. ... et al, 2016. Towards an understanding of the relationship between disciplinary research cultures and open access repository behaviours. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67 (11), pp. 2710-2724.

Publisher

Wiley / © ASIS&T

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016

Notes

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: FRY, J. ... et al, 2016. Towards an understanding of the relationship between disciplinary research cultures and open access repository behaviours. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67 (11), pp. 2710-2724., which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.23621. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.

ISSN

2330-1635

Language

  • en